Have a look around. In the different tabs above and the posts collected below, you'll find my explorations of Judaism, Israel, the Middle East, the Bible, and more. Most of them were published in places like the Tower, Forward, Jewish Ideas Daily, Contentions, or CNN.com. A little scholarship, a little personal, at times punchy or inspirational, but all of it trying to understand how our ancient tradition can inform our lives as modern, thinking people. To invite me to speak, meet, consult, or teach, just click here.

In a recent column in the Los Angeles Times, Brous writes about a trip she took with members of her family to the Jewish settlement of Hebron, a tiny, heavily fortified enclave abutting a large Palestinian city. Jewish tradition sees it as a holy city, where our Patriarchs and Matriarchs are buried. In 1929, 67 unarmed Jews, including women and children, were butchered by rioting Arabs. Today it is the epicenter of what most Americans associate with the most extreme West Bank settlers.

“Trust me, Ima,” her daughter told her. “I love Israel. I need to see the other side with my own eyes.”

What she saw included the hardships that many Palestinians face there, as well as the frankly extremist views of some Jewish residents. One of them expressed support for the notorious murderer Baruch Goldstein, the physician and Hebron resident who, in February 1994, opened fire on a hall full of Muslim worshipers, killing 29. The resident called Goldstein’s victims “animals.”

Brous then goes on to extrapolate from Hebron to everything that bothers her about the Israeli government—the oversimplifications of pro-Israel messaging, the alienation of American Jews from Israel, and so on. When you see the most extreme counter-reality, she seems to be saying, you know that the government is encouraging a line that no American Jew with a conscience can abide.

It is a moving piece, in part because she prefaces it with the genuine love she shows for Israel—a love that includes not just reading the news, but taking her kids to Israel and making sure they’re in constant touch with family in Tel Aviv.

The visit to Hebron, she writes, was meant to teach them the “complexities” of Israel.

Here’s the thing. I’m a well-read, socially liberal, fairly secular, free-market, geopolitical hawk. I opposed the surrogacy law and support the Nation-State Law. I oppose Occupation, but am realistic about the impediments to a deal right now and the risks of unilateralism, and the need to learn lessons from the Oslo disaster. I’m likely to vote center-right, but I’m in nobody’s pocket.

I’m representative, in other words, of the actual Israeli “other side,” the kind of Israeli that Likud, Yesh Atid, Kulanu, Kadima, Israel Beiteinu and Jewish Home are dying to reach. We are the silent majority of Israel, the answer to liberal American Jews’ endless bafflement at why Bibi keeps winning elections when everybody they know hates him.

Israel’s “other side” has virtually nothing to do with the people in Hebron—or at least, nothing that can be learned from a brief tour of it. If I want to show my kids the “other side” of America, I’m not taking them to a KKK rally.

And I sure wouldn’t have taken them to Hebron with Breaking the Silence—an organization whose credibility has been repeatedly called into question, and whose spokesperson, Dean Issacharoff, was caught fabricating his own purported beating of a Palestinian prisoner.

If you want your kids to understand the complexity of Israeli reality, challenge them for real.

Why do Israelis consistently vote for right-wing parties, when they clearly don’t share the views of the settlers of Hebron? Because the Left, very simply, failed them. Golda Meir failed them in the 1973 Yom Kippur War, and in the disastrous economic policies of the 1970s. Rabin and Peres failed them in the calamitous Oslo accords in 1993, which led to none of the peace they promised and a lot of dead Israeli friends. Ehud Barak, Labor’s last Prime Minister, failed them with his flailing impotence to stop the Second Intifada.

Nothing like losing a loved one in a terror attack or a war to focus the mind on the consequences of your vote on election day.

Like it or not, the leadership of the Right has led to a prolonged period of relative economic and physical security. Israelis—both Jews and Arabs alike—feel safer, and have an easier time paying their bills, than ever before. They do not have the luxury of risking that in exchange for leaders who sound nice, who say the things Jews in America want to hear.

Brous is obviously right when she says that “to love a place… does not necessarily mean to love its government.” There’s plenty to love in Israel’s diverse, eclectic and resilient society. But real love is not an abstract thing. It’s about listening to the other—really listening. Hearing uncomfortable opinions, serious opinions, presented as compellingly as possible.

With the new generation of American Jews, it means challenging them to think. It means exposing them to Israel’s many flaws and mistakes, yes, but also to the most reasonable version of opinions and views they disagree with. It means exposing them to the full complexity of Israeli reality.

I don’t know you, Rabbi Brous, and I do not question your love for Israel. But if you want to hear more about the real Israeli “other side,” call me on your next trip.

July 23, 2018

Israel’s new Nation State Law, which passed last week with the aim of affirming the country’s Jewish character, has come under considerable fire.

The new legislation is made up of mostly symbolic declarations that reaffirm the symbolism, calendar, and meaning of the “Jewish State.

And it took about eleven seconds before critics went ballistic.

Ahmed Tibi, an Arab member of Knesset and the former aide to PLO leader Yasser Arafat, declared “with shock and sorrow the death of democracy.” He was joined in his condemnation by other opposition members who shouted “Apartheid!” as they tore up the law defiantly. The chief legal counsel of ACRI, the Israeli equivalent of the ACLU, agreed. “This is a racist law,” he pronounced.

While the Times stopped short of calling the bill racist, one of its pieces opened with an outright falsity, claiming that the law declared that “only Jews have the right of self-determination in the country”— when in fact the law explicitly says “national self-determination,” something entirely different from individual freedoms (more on that later).

In its main coverage of the new legislation, New York Times Jerusalem Bureau Chief David Halbfinger gestured towards a different, widespread criticism of the bill, casting the bill as just another step in Israel’s inexorable march into darkness.

“Wrapping up its business before a long summer recess, the right-wing, religious coalition that rules Israel’s Parliament moved aggressively this week to push through its polarizing agenda, piling up points at the expense of its already weakened foes,” he wrote.

But the truth is, the Nation State bill is not overturning the applecart. In fact, it’s reaffirming some of the key ideas that always lay at the heart of the Zionist project, bringing about the correct balance of “Jewish” and “democratic” that has always been the secret sauce that makes Israel work.

And a closer look at the criticism the bill has engendered will reveal it to be nothing more than prefabricated outrage from Israeli opposition parties, American Jewish liberals, and the usual chorus of anti-Zionists and anti-Semites.

To be sure, each of these groups have different core interests and each believes different things. But all have become totally reflexive in their rejection of anything coming out of the current government. It is, in fact, hard to imagine that in the current political climate, there could have been any version of the Nation State bill coming from this government that would not have set off alarms.

Before diving in, a note about who this article is for, and who it’s not for. If you have been vociferously denouncing the law but have not read it yet (it’s a quick read); if you believe it doesn’t matter what’s in the law because its passage by a Right-Wing Israeli Government qualifies it for your fury; if you are receiving a salary or other compensation to criticize Israel; or if you simply despise Israel—this piece is not for you.

But if you’re a fair-minded person who’s troubled by the noise surrounding the law, or if you’ve read it but don’t understand why it needed to be passed, I have a lot to tell you.

So, what’s actually in the law? When you look more closely, it’s really not very controversial — or at least, it shouldn’t be.

Most mundanely, it ratifies the Hebrew calendar as the official holiday schedule of the State of Israel and it establishes Independence Day, Memorial Day and Holocaust Remembrance Day as holidays, too. It also reaffirms Israel’s special connection to diaspora Jewry. None of this is new.

Among its more talked-about provisions, however, was the clause about the Hebrew language, which for the first time was made into Israel’s sole official language, a status it has shared with Arabic up til now.

Critics have said that in the new bill, Arabic has been “demoted.” And at a highly abstract level, they are right.

And yet, the law is careful to clarify that the Arabic language will not only be granted “special status,” but also that “this clause does not harm the status given to the Arabic language before this law came into effect.”

Now, the primacy of Hebrew in the Jewish State is an obvious matter, and has been since Israel’s inception. It is the language of public discourse, of Knesset deliberations (including speeches of Arab members of Knesset), of the nightly news, of the culture, of the courts, of university classes, and of the laws themselves. Ratifying this is something quite ordinary, which democratic countries like Spain and France have done long ago.

Furthermore, the clarifying clause makes it impossible for the demotion of Arabic to be anything other than symbolic. To turn this into “the end of democracy” is nonsense.

Similarly offensive to critics was the clause according to which “The right to exercise national self-determination in the State of Israel is unique to the Jewish people.”

This, too, is almost synonymous with the very idea of a Jewish state. What could a right of “national” self-determination to non-Jewish communities inside Israel possibly mean other than ending the Jewish state as such?

More to the point, what democratic country on earth offers national self-determination to twenty percent of its citizens? With few and minor exceptions, the U.S. gives no minorities any such right. In Israel, such a right is something the Jewish majority has never granted and never promised, and never could have or should have, since day one.

This clause is not a violation of democratic principle, much less “racist” or “Apartheid,” so long as individual rights continue to be guaranteed. And they are, through the other Basic Laws that make up Israel’s constitutional reality.

Similarly baffling were objections to the law’s determination that “Jerusalem, complete and united, is the capital of Israel.” No doubt, in the context of today’s politics, anything about Jerusalem smells like jumping on the Trump-Bibi bandwagon.

Yet there is nothing at all new in it. The hope that some may have of internationalizing the Western Wall or dismantling the sprawling urban neighborhoods of Gilo and Pisgat Ze’ev has never been more than a fantasy.

At the same time—and this is crucial—the law does not define Jerusalem’s municipal boundaries, thereby leaving fully open the possibility that, when the geopolitical time is right, major Arab neighborhoods in eastern Jerusalem like Isawiyyeh, Silwan, or Jabel Mukkaber could become part of a future Palestinian State by simply redefining the city’s map.

What many in the West fail to understand is the role that Jerusalem has played in Israel’s self-definition since well before the Six Day War that led to the city’s unification under Israeli rule. There’s a reason why the IDF risked a lot to take the strategically unimportant eastern Jerusalem in 1967, and why Jerusalem, but not the West Bank, was effectively annexed in 1980.

Naomi Shemer’s song “Jerusalem of Gold”—one of the most iconic songs in Israeli history—became popular before the city was reunified. Regardless of international recognition, and in the face of global disregard, Israel declared Jerusalem its capital within two years of its independence, and has insisted on it ever since.

Finally, critics were angered by the bill’s declaration that “Jewish settlement” be “a national value” that the state will continue to promote.

Once again, distilling reality from projected fear is crucial here. The word being translated as “settlement” is hityashvut, which to any Israeli ear refers more to the Galilee and the Negev and the history of building new Jewish communities a century ago across the country than it does to the West Bank.

Yes, it is true that a major coalition partner, The Jewish Home, would love to claim a victory for the settlers of Judea and Samaria; that’s politics. But it’s the courts, not the politicians, who will interpret the law; and there is nothing in the phrasing that even hints at the West Bank; historically charged terms such as “in the Land of Israel” are nowhere to be found.

Again, you can decide that Jews should never have been encouraged to settle in their historic homeland, and the idea of a place on earth that continues to encourage it—even offering them citizenship and financial benefits for doing so—is something you can’t live with.

But then you really shouldn’t call yourself a Zionist, or even a supporter of Israel, in any meaningful sense. Building a Jewish homeland—through sovereignty, through culture, and through settlement—has always been the core purpose of the country. Should it really not appear in its Basic Laws?

Nor does anything in the law make Israel unusual for a European-style democracy. France, a country that granted equal rights to all a century before America freed its slaves, nonetheless has a single national language. The United Kingdom has an established church, as well as a hereditary monarchy. Germany will put you in prison if you deny the Holocaust.

Limits on pristine and abstract rights, especially the right to feel equally central to the narrative of the democracy in which you live, are acceptable because they are limited, and because people are complicated and human, with a real history that inevitably influences the core principles of their social contract.

Even democracies have a right to enshrine in law the things that make them unique.

To suggest that Israel alone shouldn’t be allowed to is self-evidently absurd, and smells a lot more like political noise-making than honest criticism.

It’s true that Israel’s Nation State law was passed by a right-leaning national government. But a much more meaningful way to look at it is in its historical and constitutional context.

This law has been in the works at least since the early 2000s, a time when two major forces arose that threatened the Zionist project as it was historically understood. The first was the rise of “post-Zionism,” a small but passionate intellectual-political movement that explicitly repudiated the idea of a “Jewish state” and sought to transform the country into a “state of all its citizens” by stripping it of any connection to Jewish history, peoplehood, or symbolism.

The second, more important factor was the “constitutional revolution” led by then-Supreme Court President Aharon Barak, which recognized earlier Basic Laws as having constitutional status, and which culminated in the passing of two new Basic Laws (Basic Law Human Dignity and Liberty, and Basic Law: Freedom of Employment) that established the core rights of Israeli citizens, Jewish or not.

These basic laws were not at all a bad thing. The fact is, Israel is both a Jewish state and a liberal democracy, and basic freedoms must be protected for all.

But defenders of Zionism correctly noted that such laws would have to be balanced with similar protections of Israel’s flag and anthem and the original vision of the country as not just a refuge for oppressed Jews but also as the embodiment of the aspirations of the Jewish people.

Much of what we see in the law is the direct result of the big debates that happened back then—debates I was directly involved in.

The bottom line is that Israel is the Jewish State, and this law tells us what that means, just as other Basic Laws tell us what goes into its democratic foundations.

You can freely dislike the idea of an ethnically or historically based democracy for a specific people. But know that it’s not fascism, it’s not the rise of ethno-national-populist-alt-right-MAGA-Bannonism. That’s just a category error—one that a lot of people really want you to make right now.

Israel’s Nation state bill reflects rather, the constitutional reality of nearly every European democracy, and European democracy has always been a little different from American democracy.

If you have any interest in understanding what’s really a fascinating and historic development in a country far away, the one I actually live in, tune out the noise.

December 13, 2017

There is nothing weirder than the gap between the American Jewish conversation about Israel, on the one hand, and the real day-to-day lives of Israelis on the other.

American Jews are re-litigating the twentieth century, while Israelis are living the twenty-first.

American Jews ask: will Israel make peace or live forever by the sword? Why does the occupation never end? Will antisemitism destroy us all? Do Jews have a right to every inch of the biblical lands? Will Netanyahu cause a break with American Jews? Will Israel’s democracy be ruined by demography? How will the tiny Jewish state survive against an ocean of enemies? These are questions Israelis have mostly stopped asking, and American Jews cannot understand why.

The answer is that everything has changed. The strategic, economic and cultural opportunities facing Israel have drowned out the existential threats. The old anxieties have been overrun by both Israel’s successes and failures.

Successes: it is now a vibrant and powerful country, and its power has changed the thinking of national governments not just in Europe but also across the Arab world. Today Israel has only one real strategic enemy – Iran, which has been the force behind all of Israel’s wars in the past decade-and-a-half.

Economically, the Jewish state has become a global leader in technology, from agriculture to autonomous vehicles. It has solved its two biggest problems of nature: water and energy. Culturally, it has become an exporter in everything from film to art to wine to architecture to electronic music.

Israelis now count their Nobel prizes the way Jews used to.

But also failures: the Yom Kippur war and the Oslo Accords taught Israelis about the horror that flows from self-delusion. The endless Palestinian terrorism has taught them that not every malady can be cured, that some must instead be managed.

Rabin’s assassination proved the danger of messianic frenzy. Socialism sank in a sea of red ink.

Yet as Israelis are busy doing Zionism – building a prosperous, forward-facing, secure Jewish state – and Americans are wringing their hands about Zionism; nobody is really engaged in new Zionist thought.

Co-authored with Adam Scott Bellos. To read the rest of this essay as published at The Jerusalem Post, click here.

June 15, 2017

Two great problems face American Jewry today. From a certain perspective, they amount to an existential crisis.

The first one is called “assimilation,” or “continuity,” or “identity,” and it relates to the failure of Jewish organizations, philanthropists, religious movements, and parents to successfully transmit the Jewish collective commitment from one generation to the next. It is measured in intermarriage rates, synagogue membership, household rituals, fertility, and other metrics.

It has been going on for a long time, widely discussed since at least 1990, though still quite unsolved. Meanwhile, the numbers are getting worse, and some of the ominous predictions we have heard for decades now are coming true before our eyes. A new generation has risen that wears its identity lightly, and sees “peoplehood” as more a relic than a need.

The second one may be called the “Israel problem,” and it is rapidly becoming a major concern. Young Jews who have grown up on the ideal of tikun olam, “repairing the world,” do not understand how their parents’ commitment to an armed ethnic nation-state, born of last century’s fears, led by “right-wing” leaders, fits into their Jewish identity. For some, the things they have heard about the occupation, religious issues, and the treatment of minorities—some true, some false—suggest to them that Israel should be criticized rather than championed. For others, the complexity of the issues and the discomfort of being a Jew in public leads them to “tune out,” not just about Israel but about Jewish commitment more broadly.

Parents, too, are disconcerted by Israel. Having built much of their sense of Jewish fulfillment on public support for Israel, they now see Israel’s problems, no less than its enemies, as a cause for angst. Gary Rosenblatt, editor of The New York Jewish Week, put it this way in a famous 2011 column entitled “When Israel Becomes a Source of Embarrassment”:

Most American Jews want to feel proud of the Jewish State, not frustrated or ashamed. It doesn’t help when they read of continued settlement growth, the flotilla debacle, Foreign Minister Lieberman’s hard-line comments about Israeli Arabs and other issues, or that the Knesset conducted inquiries into the funding sources of NGOs, or that the Chief Rabbinate is increasingly rigid on matters of marriage, divorce and conversion.

Since then, we’ve seen the rise of groups like J Street, which describe themselves as “pro-Israel” but make their support contingent on Israel’s behaving a certain way, and consequently spend far greater energies criticizing than praising. In a 2015 statement, the group’s leader Jeremy Ben-Ami said his group stood for “an Israel that is committed to its core democratic principles and Jewish values”—a phrasing he and others have used repeatedly as a veiled threat against any Israel they see as potentially violating these principles and values.

It is important to recognize that this tension or crisis exists not on some objective plane, but principally within the minds and culture of non-Orthodox American Jewry. Outside the confines of that conversation—say, inside Israel, or among the Orthodox, or among America’s evangelical community—the question of whether Israel’s political decision-making has crossed a line that merits the withdrawal of support is not only a non-question, it’s even a bit baffling. For all but a fringe element inside these communities, support for Israel is not a conditional love. Inside non-Orthodox American Jewry, however, it is a burning issue—possibly the central issue of identity in our time.

These two factors—assimilation and Israel-angst—are the real sources of crisis. These and not others, like anti-Semitism or terrorism, because they are problems of the spirit: a collective Jewish spirit that is no longer sure of its future or even its present, an insecurity that both expresses and exacerbates the problem. These issues have, simply, made “being Jewish” into something problematic for the next generation of non-Orthodox Jews.

This next generation is no longer moored to Jewish peoplehood through guilt, or habit, or peer pressure. Jewish identity, if it is to reside in them at all, will have to compete for their allegiance in a brutally efficient market of identification. So far, “Jewish” is failing to compete.

Not long ago I was traveling through a midwestern American city, together with a young colleague. A talented development professional in his mid-twenties whose mother is president of a Reform congregation on the West Coast. Together we attended a “Night to Honor Israel,” a Christian event. He had never been to one of these. The choreography, the power of the commitment, the love and song, the enchanting spectacle, the production values—it all moved him. Though he was not inclined to bring Christ into his heart, he nonetheless felt something that could be called acute jealousy. That Judaism in America was producing nothing remotely parallel in its power to inspire.

“We are really in trouble,” he mused.

Some of the data should strike panic. According to a major study conducted by the Pew Institute in 2013, merely 16 percent of Reform Jews in America see religion as “very important” to them, compared with 56 percent of Americans as a whole. Reform Jews make up 35 percent of American Jewry. For the second biggest group, “Jews of no denomination,” who constitute another 30 percent of American Jewry, the number who say religion is “very important” is just 8 percent. Not unrelated, fully 30 percent of Reform Jews, and 51 percent of non-denominational Jews, had Christmas trees in their homes that year—a classic marker for a clearly differentiated Jewish identity in America.

Commitment to religion is not the only indicator of Jewish identity, of course. Perhaps more alarming are the numbers that point to swift and widespread assimilation. Fifty-eight percent of Jews who married since 2000 have married non-Jews. Of children raised in intermarried families, fully 41 percent do not identify as Jews at all, and another 30 percent are “Jews of no religion”—a category that carries a rate of synagogue membership of about 4 percent, and leads to raising children who themselves do not identify as Jews at a pace of 67 percent.

Some readers may bristle at talking about such matters as indicative of a regressive or vaguely racist approach. But for those of us who still see the preservation of an unalloyed Jewish identity across generations as a vital mission, for those of us who really do not want to be the last link in the chain—for us, the effects of the machinery of assimilation, alongside low fertility, are difficult to deny. For generations, the Jewish part of America has dwindled. In 1948, more than 3.5 percent of the American population were Jews. Today the number is around 1.7 percent. It has been dropping consistently across the decades. The portion of children in America being raised as Jews today is about 1.2 percent.

A generation from now, this community will be much smaller than it is now.

The size of American Jewry has been dropping consistently across the decades. Photo: Max Pixel

Oblivion knocks. The two obvious alternatives—aliya and Orthodoxy—require so radical a change in one’s lifestyle that they’re non-starters for most American Jews. If those were the only options, most would choose oblivion.

So what can be done? Though part of the problem may be alleviated through increased investment in education and convincing non-Orthodox parents to have more kids, such noble efforts today feel like putting oil on a hinge that has already rusted through. In other words, it’s time to ask whether the problem is not in the marketing, but in the product itself. Perhaps Jewish identity, as understood in non-Orthodox America in the past century, is inherently incapable of winning adherents among its own children in sustainable numbers today.

If true, this would suggest only one path forward: A dramatic rethinking of what Jewish identity is. To use a cliché, a disruption.

It will require that Jewish identity itself be reconceived in a way that will make it competitive and inspiring, but which has the resources behind it—financial, spiritual, creative, technical—to offer a sustainable way of life. One that is uniquely Jewish, tapping into the ancient wellspring without demanding an abdication of modern life in America. One that is adaptive to change, because the rapidity of change has become the Achilles’ heel of institutional Judaism. One that will not become, as so many Jewish movements have, obsolete before it has a chance to catch fire.

Increasingly, one such alternative form of Jewish identity is taking shape. It is, for lack of a better term, “Israeliness.” Israel, which has for generations occupied the place in the American Jewish mind of a political cause, has suddenly emerged as something very different: A civilizational force. It has just begun to unleash itself on the world.

September 29, 2016

Anyone who came of political age in the 1980s or 1990s and followed Israel closely will have complex feelings about Shimon Peres. Like so many great democratic leaders, he was also a politician, and in the thick of the country’s internal battles he was never seen inside his own country through the same lens as around the world.

His own party often questioned his leadership: Despite serving as prime minister three separate times, he never actually won a national election outright, and he was once even heckled as a “loser.” As for the opposition on the right, his parliamentary chicanery and unusually polished presentation made him a magnet for their vilification. And that was before the quixotic 1993 Oslo Accords and the terror that followed, which brought his final electoral defeat in 1996.

Yet today, all these feelings are dwarfed by the colossal achievements of the man.

Peres was complicated, perhaps the most enigmatic figure in Israeli history. His acts as a savvy weapons-procurer in the 1940s and 50s, as the wheeler-dealer behind the nuclear project Israelis just call “Dimona” in the early 1960s, and as the modernizer of the Israeli economy in the mid-1980s in the face of economic collapse, heralding what would become a new era in Israeli market-driven growth, were heroic.

His behind-the-scenes support for the settlement movement in the 1970s — which he saw as a kindred idealism and as vital for widening the Jewish state’s impossible borders — baffled many in his own party. His stewardship of the Oslo process in the 1990s, though problematic in so many ways, nonetheless brought a breakthrough in Israel’s global status.

In his final career move, at the age of 83, Peres left the trenches of politics and assumed the presidency after the two previous holders of the office had brought the country little more than shame. In this last great role, he finally earned the nation’s admiration,and may well have saved the presidency itself — an institution that, though largely symbolic, does more than almost any other to foster a belief among Israelis that they are all one.

But beyond his achievements, there is something else. Peres symbolized the nation’s dream. Like Theodor Herzl, his mind was half a century in the future, even as he fought to forge new realities. As with Herzl, not every piece of Peres’s dream was workable in his time, and some efforts yielded bitter fruit. But his refusal to let go of the great visions made him an embodiment of Zionism.

Christopher Hitchens once wrote that Herzl’s Zionism was one of the only times in history that a “magical” dream ever became reality. Herzl’s life injected into the DNA of the Jewish state a unique relationship between vision and reality, a tirelessness and cleverness that offered audacity without illusion. In this way, Zionism broke with centuries of Jewish tradition, which had been all about preservation and adaptation. But like Jewish tradition before it, Zionism was always about the affirmation of life, and the vision of a prosperous, secure, decent and free Jewish collective within the confines of the possible.

Like Herzl, Peres injected a boundless creative energy into the Zionist project from his early days, when nothing was needed more than arms to defend the new state from the onslaught of Arab armies, to his last days, when the advent of technology offered the promise of an Israel that could blaze a path forward for humanity. Like Herzl, he saw a great nation as the key to a better world. Like Herzl, he too paid a heavy personal price for his commitment.

But unlike Herzl, he was allowed to keep fighting for it into his tenth decade.

Shimon Peres was the last of Israel’s founding fathers, and with his passage every Israeli feels orphaned, having lost not just the man, but also his whole generation of leaders. Today Israelis know that something very essential — a clear-eyed view of the pre-1948 world, which brought the Jews a homeland with a revolutionary fervor and never stopped building and seeking peace — is gone. Not only is his wisdom gone, but also his romantic urge, for this was a man who even in his nineties articulated a future without fear.

Because he symbolized possible dreams, Peres touched hearts around the world and will be globally honored perhaps more than any Israeli has ever been. But his heart was always for his country. He was our own, our debt to him endless, and Israelis on the left and right will mourn him as only family can.

July 27, 2016

A crazy, cunning man named Max is terrorizing your town. Max — who likes to go by “Supreme Leader” — has a long history of violent assaults, extortion and robbery. He’s been jailed, fined, publicly humiliated. But with a winning smile and an uncanny ability to sound reasonable, he manages to recruit followers who are as violent, if not as clever, as himself.

One day, the town decides it’s had enough. A combination of criminal investigations and civil suits bears down on Max. Feeling the heat and strapped for cash, he makes his gambit. He starts talking about buying a military-grade assault rifle. He stockpiles ammunition. He spends time at the range. He is seen in the darker parts of Wal-Mart.

Terrified, the mayor and police chief call him in for a chat. They ask him, “What do you need in order to not get that rifle?” He flashes his golden smile. “$10 million. Change the laws so I can do what I want. Affirm my right to have a rifle for peaceful purposes. Let me keep my goons and some of my bullets. Do all that — and I’ll put off the rifle thing for a couple of years.”

This is the structure of the deal arrived at a year ago between the six most influential world powers and the Islamic Republic of Iran. With the deal, known as the JCPOA, a terror-supporting, expansionist regime — the puppet-master of war criminals and flagrant violator of human rights and nuclear treaties and Security Council resolutions — has successfully shaken down the powers of the world, securing a massive commitment of cash, legitimacy and arms in exchange for an unsigned promise to put off its nuclear bomb for a decade.

Some ideas are bad ideas no matter how many cutely coiffed experts or slippery diplomats tell you otherwise. Like the mayor’s promises to Max, the Iran deal is self-evidently misguided to anyone who knows the history, the incentives and the way regimes like Iran’s work.

And yet a year later, Iran-deal supporters are awash in self-congratulation. They continue to insist that “smart diplomacy works” and that “we’ve cut off all pathways to the bomb.” They cite short-term threat assessments, quantities of enriched uranium and numbers of centrifuges halted as proof that things are going spinningly.

They’re not. Even on the nuclear issues, Iran keeps scouring for new technology to make a bomb — as a recent German intelligence report showed. It keeps developingballistic missiles, which, we are to believe, are meant solely for delivering kebobs to your table faster than an Amazon drone.

But questions of compliance were never central to the criticism of the JCPOA. To those who bothered to listen, rather than just “discourse the [expletive] out of this,” as Deputy National Security Adviser for Strategic Communications Ben Rhodes put it, the biggest concerns had to do with a broader context of the vast empowerment of a historically bad actor. The arguments in the deal’s defense, on the other hand, continue to sound like year-old echo-chamber prattle, to which we’ve grown so inured that we have fallen silent while the Middle East reels against the most evil empire on Earth, Europe faces its greatest upheaval in generations because of millions of refugees created by Iran’s favorite proxy, and the United States berates its allies for protesting while it plots to keep Bashar al-Assad in power instead of ending the nightmare.

It can never be said enough: Assad, the greatest war criminal of the 21st century, whose efforts at self-preservation have destroyed a whole nation, is a poodle to the Iranian regime, and has been for a long time. And from what we now know, American flip-floppery about his removal was nothing like the act of baffling incompetence that it initially seemed; rather, it was a sincere effort to keep Assad’s masters in Tehran at the table. The humanitarian cost of this policy beggars belief.

As for Iran itself, virtually everything bad about the regime has gotten worse. Its mainsail hoisted, Tehran has ramped up its jailing and execution of women who’ve been raped, of gay people, of dissidents; has continued, through its proxies, the wars in Syria and Yemen; deepened its hold on Iraq; poured advanced weapons into southern Lebanon to threaten Israel, and launched a campaign to destabilize Bahrain. It has responded to continued nonnuclear sanctions by bombing the banks that enforce them. Yet all these are drowned out by the sucking sound of American influence draining from the region.

As Iran has marched forward, the United States has acted like a starving vegan at a butcher shop: All options disgust, all decisions are half-hearted. The White House has little leverage to get Congress or state legislatures to lift other sanctions or stop new ones. The secretary of state racks up mileage trying to get businesses to invest in Iran, while his own State Department reminds us that Iran continues to be the world’s leading sponsor of terror.

Meanwhile, the discovery of new lies made in defense of the deal has turned into a Pokémon Go-style adventure game for Washington, D.C., reporters. The “most intrusive inspections ever” were actually a front for Iranian self-inspection at key sites; the deal that’s supposed to be “only about the nuclear issue” includes lifting the conventional arms embargo and, apparently, non-enforcement of nonnuclear sanctions and telling everybody that Iran is “open for business.” And the “moderates” the deal was supposed to empower have suddenly given way to the hard-liners, for the simple reason that there never really were two camps to begin with. This, too, was a product of Rhodes’s ingenious Iransplaining machine: The real moderates, it turns out, are all in jail or exiled or dead.

But none of this would matter quite so much if the inherent logic of the deal made sense for American interests or for the world. That we’ve spent very little time talking about that simple question is a credit to the magic of modern media manipulation and the American passion for distraction.

Max may or may not have stopped accumulating bullets. But in the meantime, he’s definitely grown a lot stronger. His crimes are worse, and he now has momentum: People in town either join with him or feel like it’s just not worth fighting if their own leaders won’t do anything. And every time someone calls him on it, all he can talk about is that damned assault rifle. “You know,” he chides them, “I can still buy it anytime I want.”

And when the mayor is asked about all the old investigations and punishments, he tells us that they really were meant just to bring Max to the table. “But this deal,” the mayor reminds us, “has cut off all pathways to that rifle. The world is a safer place.”

And anyone who questions that wisdom is weirdly smeared as a warmonger, an Israel-firster or — heaven forbid — a right-winger.

June 15, 2016

Whoever said that truth always wins out hasn’t spent much time in Washington. In this town of majestic monuments and post-adolescent ambition-addicts, where the campaign never ends and only impotence is considered unseemly, truth is a butterfly in a mist of acid rain. It’s hard to catch, harder still to save.

Successful leaders have always been adept at deception, of course. To say politicians are liars is to state a truism and to ignore the unpleasant fact that sometimes one must deceive in order to achieve.

But in the last couple of years, something seems different, especially relating to the Obama administration’s signature policy initiative of its second term: The nuclear deal with Iran.

Two recent devastating profiles—one of President Barack Obama by Jeffrey Goldberg in The Atlantic and the other of Obama’s communications chief Ben Rhodes by David Samuels in The New York Times Magazine—have revealed a kaleidoscope of mendacity so sophisticated, creative, consuming, and substantively boundless as to give rise to a sense that something essential has changed in the relationship between truth and falsehood, between the actual policies of an administration and its efforts to sell them.

At a deep level, spin displaced policy. Not only were key promises in the deal’s favor knowingly fabricated for the purpose of persuasion; not only were the scope and ambitions of the deal, the timeline of when talks began, the internal dynamics of the regime in Iran, and the priorities driving the American side during each stage willfully distorted; not only were journalists and experts whose entire reputations should have been at stake enlisted in the government’s sorcery; not only were official records doctored; but the process of decision-making within the administration appears to have been short-circuited as well.

Members of the cabinet had little if any input. Indeed, in some cases their presence was entirely intended to misdirect the public’s understanding of the worldview behind the policy. Implementation of the president’s intentions was delegated, instead, to a staffer with the portentous title of Deputy National Security Advisor for Strategic Communications.

Obama and Rhodes, March 2012. Photo: Pete Souza / White House

The “deal” with Iran that was concluded in July 2015 was not even exactly a deal. The document, called the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, was never actually signed, even as the administration continued to insist that the deal was “not based on trust.” The version approved by the Iranian parliament, and the provisions described by Iran’s leaders, were different from those submitted to Congress and the American people. We were assured that Congress would be given a say, but the nature of the say included a truncated process, suppression of side deals, and a vote in which two-thirds of members were required to override a veto and stop the implementation, which is very different from the two-thirds of the Senate required to approve treaties.

To top it all off, in key parts of the document—where the administration’s long-promised “snap-back sanctions” purportedly appeared—the text actually included the Iranians’ express rejection of the concept, declaring that the entire deal would be off if sanctions were restored. Meaning “snap-back sanctions” were never agreed to. Meaning a central plank of the agreement wasn’t really part of the deal at all.

Taken together, this amounted to a grand deception, a Big Lie of astonishing proportions and complexity aimed at deceiving the public about both the intentions and dynamics of the foremost foreign policy initiative of the Obama presidency.

And yet, all the focus on the Big Lie that has emerged since the publication of these two essays risks obscuring something arguably more important: the decision to make the deal in the first place. What we ended up with, we have only now begun to understand, amounts to a massive shift in thinking about America’s role in the world, the ultimate aim of which was hidden from public view, as was the core philosophy that motivated it.

This too was kept secret, though nothing about the Iran deal makes sense without it.

October 07, 2015

The world is in a water crisis, one that will grow more severe in the coming decade. Water shortages will soon lead to increasing political instability, displacement of populations, and, more likely than not, political unrest and war.

Though this water crisis overlaps with the more widely-discussed problem of climate change, it is different in many ways. It is more acute and more concrete, in that it focuses on a single resource without which humanity cannot live. Its causes are less controversial. Its dimensions are more easily measured. And its catastrophic effects are playing out more clearly and more quickly.

It is also a problem that can be decisively solved without anything remotely resembling the economic restructuring and political acrobatics required to address climate change. Fully effective solutions to the water crisis have already been found. They only need to be implemented.

The world’s water problem is being caused by multiple simultaneous factors: Reduced rainfall, increased population, and the rapid development of impoverished societies have all come together to deplete the amount of water available to humankind. None of these causes are going away. Solutions will come only from changing the way we find and use water.

To make sure supply stays ahead of demand, we need to talk about where we get water, how we use it, and what happens to it afterwards. We need methods for procuring usable water, not just from lakes and rivers and rain, but also from the sea and our own waste. We need farming methods that use much less water, and better ways to prevent leakage and contamination. We need policies that encourage all of these things without undercutting economic growth and our way of life. If we had to start today, it would take decades to come up with the answers.

But we don’t have to start today. All these solutions have been in the works for more than half a century.

The country that has dedicated the greatest resources, innovation, and cultural attention to the problem of water scarcity is Israel. Founded on a dry strip of land smaller than New Hampshire, saddled with absorbing millions of immigrants, Israel has been worrying about water for a very long time. Today, it leads the way in solving problems of water supply, spearheading efforts to deal with water leakage, farming efficiency, recycling waste, desalination, pricing policy, and education. This has resulted in a water revolution unlike anywhere else on earth; a revolution not just of technology, but of thought, policy, and culture. For this reason, Israelis will be at the heart of any effort to solve the global water crisis.

September 01, 2015

Jane Eisner’s interview with President Obama brings into relief no fewer than four separate dramas that have come to a head in the last year — three real, one fake.

The fake one is the so-called crisis in U.S.-Israel relations. Here I agree fully with both the President and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu: Disagreement over the Iran deal cannot unravel the mutual strategic interest, shared democratic values and world-historical sensibility that bind the two nations. Nor has actual policy toward Israel changed much. We are still a long way off from Eisenhower’s fury in 1956, Nixon’s hesitation in 1973, Reagan’s suspension of strategic cooperation after Osirak in 1981, or the elder Bush’s threats in the early 1990s.

So, what are the real dramas?

1) The political battle over the Iran deal

To put it bluntly, the deal’s flaws are so evident — flooding an expansionist, tyrannical, terrorist regime with the cash, weapons and legitimacy it needs to reign unchecked for another generation in exchange for unverifiable, unenforceable promises to delay rather than dismantle its nuclear weapons program — that Americans have turned against it. The President, who crafted the deal in a way that would eviscerate Congressional oversight, now finds himself flailing inside his own party just to scrape together enough Senate votes to force a filibuster that would prevent debate in the one body assigned by the Constitution to serve as a check against foolhardy foreign policy.

This is why he talks so much about Iran in the Forward interview: He may have won the policy battle, but whether through the spectacle of filibuster or the humiliation of a bipartisan “no” vote, he is losing the political war — and he knows it.

2) Relations between Israel and American Jews

As Eisner suggests, there is a shrinking core of American Jewish thought leaders who claim the historic mantle of the community, who see themselves as perched between the twin abysses of bitter disengagement and the unthinkable embrace of whatever it is Netanyahu stands for — hawkishness, nationalism, racism, settlements, rejection of peace.

Never mind the mischaracterization of Bibi; the real problem is that the Iran Deal is opposed by Israel’s mainstream Left as well, laying bare a deep contradiction that threatens to tear apart American Jewry.

There’s a long history to consider here. American Jews in the “moderate middle” are, in fact, inheritors of a worldview that once embraced super-secular socialism and, going back far enough, rejected Zionism outright. This community looked to America rather than to Palestine as its promised land, replaced “exile” with “Diaspora,” preferred Judaism as a secular-social political aesthetic with the trappings of ritual, shunned the Hebrew language and eventually forgot its Yiddish too, lost touch with its texts, and above all was abidingly uncomfortable with Jewish sovereignty, or at least with the nastiness and outward pride that sovereignty necessitates.

Much has changed in a century, but this worldview still pulls, causing many to wish there were a different Israel, a softer, social-democratic dream. Bibi’s Israel is, to them, an enigma wrapped in anathema, one that flirts with fascism, fanaticism and voracious capitalism — evil triplets that remind them of their worst American enemies, of Buchanan and Bush and greed.

These are stereotypes, but Israelis are the way they are for a reason: Having lived through the strategic disasters of the 1970s, the economic disasters of the 1980s and the terror of the 1990s, they want merely to live long and prosper, and that has meant shedding the statism, the kibbutz and illusions about what peace can look like. If Netanyahu has become the most dominant leader since Ben-Gurion, it is because his liberal-hawkish policies embody the collective experience of a people — an experience American Jews have largely shielded themselves from even as they wave the blue and white flag. In Israel, he is the moderate middle.

The Iran debate has brought all of this to the surface. Deep down, American Jews know that on this issue Netanyahu is merely reflecting what the vast majority of Israelis think, and that the gap between Israel and American Jewry is growing wider every day, busting the crust of coherence that the community has enjoyed. In a head-to-head clash between that Prime Minister and their President, how could it not? Which leads us to…

3) Relations between the President and American Jews

If the only profound way to express Jewish identity (and no, I don’t see either support for Israel or Holocaust remembrance as especially profound) is through social change in America, of America, then there can be no greater symbol of Jewish self-worth than a President who symbolizes that change. And the President has rewarded their loyalty, not just with access and a “schmear” of affection, but above all by adopting their worldview when it comes to the Israel debate.

So, like them, he weirdly knows Israel’s strategic needs better than Israel’s elected leaders do, and he’s deeply worried about Israel’s “isolation” — despite the country’s increasing integration into the global economy, deepened ties to China and India, newly found self-sufficiency in water and energy, and its best strategic relationship with the Arab powers since its founding.

Is the President an anti-Semite? Assuredly not. It is much more fair to say that the specific gaffes that have triggered the accusation — describing the attack at the Hyper Cacher supermarket as a decision to “randomly shoot a bunch of folks in a deli in Paris,” making a dog-whistle mention of the “money and lobbyists” countering the Iran deal, and responding feebly to accusations of dual loyalty hurled at Chuck Schumer — reflect the tin ear and political urgency of a man scrambling to keep it together.

What he is, rather, is a President whose signal foreign policy achievement makes little sense to most Americans, and who has tied its legacy to the only domestic constituency he knows he can count on to support it.

President Obama, however, will be gone in a year and a half — and where does that leave American Jews? Iran will not change, for precisely the same reasons that money, arms and legitimacy never turned Yasser Arafat into a peacemaker. The world will grow darker, as it does from time to time, and Jews will survive, and Israel will fight on, while the moderate-middle standard-bearers of American Jewish identity will, once again, have bet on the wrong horse, and the next generation will accuse them for it, if they can remember who they are.

June 25, 2015

More than two years after moving back from Israel, I still feel like a newbie in weird Washington. Feel the air: so hot and humid that when it rains, it feels more like an ancient marsh rising up from the earth. Thirsty? There’s the innovative use of alcohol, at all times of day, as a replacement for caffeine. Now taste the food: Even the fancy restaurants serve up bland fat-and-carb fare that’s more wonk-fuel than cuisine.

There are special sounds, too. Listen closely, and you will hear the noise machine.

What is the noise machine? It’s a big, organized collection of individuals and groups that actively promotes whatever policy the White House is pushing on a given day, creating the impression of public support — kind of like a sailboat tugging a huge electric fan, humming day and night, pushing the boat forward. Now, I know that every political party and corporation on earth has its own noise machine. But no PR effort is as well funded and sophisticatedly spun as those of the great centers of executive political power. And with the possible exception of the Kremlin, none is as impressive as that of the White House, under any administration. Most people working for that noise machine are not on the payroll of the federal government. Many are paid by supporting organizations. Others volunteer. But you can tell who they are by their uncharacteristic fluidity of speech — it’s easier to rehearse arguments from a talking-points memo—and by the quickness of their outrage at seemingly trivial things.

Right now, the urgent efforts of the noise machine are promoting a historic nuclear deal with Iran. This makes sense: This is the signature policy effort of the past few years (Ben Rhodes called it “The ObamaCare of the second term”). The deadline is very soon, and it’s an obviously tough sell: Talks initiated with the stated aim of dismantling Iran’s nuclear weapons program have morphed into a deal that feels more like “Iran agrees to put off building its bomb until the next administration, and in exchange they get to keep their bomb-building capabilities, have sanctions removed, and implicitly legitimize their expansionism, their terror support, their ballistic missiles and their human rights abuses.” Bait, meet switch.

When somebody comes along who threatens to seriously harm the noise machine’s efforts at such a crucial moment, you can bet that the machine’s vast appalled galvanized chromium umbrage will focus on them. Like when the prime minister of Israel had the gall to accept a congressional invitation to give a speech that called for a different approach on the Iran deal than that of the administration. Or this year, when Israel’s former ambassador to Washington, Michael Oren, releases a book telling of his time in Washington (“Ally: My Journey Across the American-Israeli Divide”) and does it just when the talks are coming to a head. In it we see an insider’s account of the dramatic change of America’s behind-the-scenes policy toward the Iranian regime, dating all the way back to the administration’s first year: from its tepid response to the democratic protests in 2009, to harsh warnings against an Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities, to actions that contradicted the official White House line that “all options are on the table” with Iran. Without ever slipping into hyperbole, the book’s measured narrative seems to confirm a lot of what the administration’s critics have been accusing it of: enabling the Iranian regime rather than really trying to stop it, while putting a vice grip on the increasingly alarmed Israelis.

Now, like about half the people writing about this book, I have known the author personally. I worked with him years ago, when we were both connected to the same research institute in Jerusalem, when I edited his occasional essays at the journal Azure. We have stayed in touch. We disagree on Israeli politics, and it’s safe to say that he’s no Likudnik. He is also a decent person, a meticulous historian and, as everybody knows by now, a masterful storyteller.

In his new book he tells an incredible story that has been largely drowned out by the noise machine. This has happened because he also does a few things that, from the White House’s perspective, hurt a lot. None of them are unreasonable for a professional historian who had a close-up view of history unfolding. None of them violate codes or red lines in journalism or public debate. He analyzed not just the policies, but also the possible motives of President Obama against his biographical background. He gave his impressions of the uses of Jewish identity among people defending the White House. In the interviews and columns leading up to the launch, he repeated these themes.

This is all pretty standard stuff, and probably wouldn’t have raised much of a storm if they had been published at a different time. Analyzing a leader’s motivations against the backdrop of his upbringing is no different from David Remnick of The New Yorker analyzing the motives of Benjamin Netanyahu in light of his own father. And risking accusations of stereotyping in order to hold a mirror to some American Jews may be uncomfortable, but it is legitimate: Many Israelis, like myself, react the same way when trying to understand some American Jews. Nobody seriously worried about our collective Jewish future should want to silence that perspective. Why, then, the freakout? The noise machine, that’s why.

Oren’s book fell into the noise machine like a clock into a clothes dryer. There is no other way to explain why, for example, the State Department felt that alongside its pretty busy schedule, it should send officials to attack the book — unless they are attacking it for the same reason that they Twitter-bombed a recent New York Times report about the amount of nuclear fuel the Iranians are stockpiling. When faced with a serious threat to its messaging, the noise machine goes into action, like antibodies against a virus. But anyone without skin in the game can see that those involved are overreacting — just as they did when Netanyahu came to Washington, or when he said things he shouldn’t have said in the run-up to an election and then apologized. Politicians in every democracy run for office, say stupid things, walk them back, and everyone moves on when it’s over. I recall Obama saying a few stupid things when he ran for president as well.

Oren has been accused of being a politician. True — though the noise machine had no problem when the same politician spoke critically of Netanyahu’s Washington speech during the Israeli election campaign. He has also been accused of trying to boost book sales — which, last I heard, are how authors make a living. But none of this actually addresses the substance of the story he is telling, or justifies all those well-orchestrated displays of outrage. That’s why David Rothkopf, editor of the FP Group, who despite knowing Oren for decades still finds some of his remarks “offensively wrong,” nonetheless argues that the reaction to the book has been “disproportionate” and that Oren’s “views demand to be published because they are a vital piece of evidence as to why the rift in the U.S.-Israel relationship has become what it is.”

The most important goal of a well-oiled noise machine, you see, is to change the subject. Instead of addressing the criticism, it makes the messenger into the story.

But sophisticated readers should be able to see through it. The book, you will find, is an irreplaceable trove of insight into what will one day be seen as a momentous historical turn. And we will be forever grateful to Oren for having written it.